Abstract
Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–72) is recognized not only as the leading theological voice among North American Jews in the postwar decades, but also as a writer whose theology had an particularly passionate and evocative quality, drawing a large following, both Jewish and Christian, including many who were not regular readers of theological treatises.1 A major element in that attractiveness lay in Heschel’s ability to speak of God in deeply human terms, including especially his willingness to speak of God’s need for man.2 In fact, if you open Shai Held’s magisterial treatment of Heschel’s theology, you will find in the introduction that, “The sentence that appears in Heschel’s writings more frequently than any other – one encounters it countless times in his vast corpus – is a simple one: ‘God is in need of man.’”3 While I think there may be some overstatement here, the point is clearly...